my unfiltered thoughts on the data industry right now: there are too many brokers in the data space. in the last 4 months this industry has become the new equivalent to dropshipping. i have no issue with that. but if your entire moat is spam calling smb owners all day and begging them to license their data for a micro1 referral fee, you are not going to make it, and you are not the next mercor. most of you are not building anything at all. to everyone reading this, and the hundreds of other posts on your timeline from 18 year old sf kids claiming $200m run rates please ignore them. these are the modern day elizabeth holmes’. they're taking one day of contracted (not paid) revenue and multiplying it by 365. the worst i've seen is someone who made $100k off a micro1 referral fee in 6 hours and claimed they're at a $73m run rate (12 (daily working hours) / 6 x $100k x 365). this is literal fraud, especially if you raise money off of this claim. you see this in a lot of yc companies in recent batches. the only businesses i see surviving this are the giants that already exist (mercor, micro1, surge ai, turing) and the non consensus bets: consumer data collection apps like kled, robotics data collection companies like build ai and meckaai, etc. tldr: don’t believe everything you read, and just brokering company data is not a venture scale business and should not be claimed as such.